The Box: Tales From the Darkroom Page 4

  But let’s suppose, just for the fun of it, he’d gone with Mariechen to Checkpoint Charlie, in the American sector, on a certain day and waited patiently, then said, Now! Snap away, Mariechen! she and her box would have caught a sports car with a Rome licence plate, and in the passenger seat …

  Right, big brother! And driving that car—let’s assume it was a two-seater, maybe an Alfa Romeo—was an Italian, a dentist, let’s say, called Emilio, who’d come from Rome to Berlin for the express purpose.

  And in the passenger seat would have been a young woman—tall and slender—wearing sunglasses and a kerchief over her head that concealed her curly hair.

  And this Emilio would have taken his chances, and not feeling scared at all, would’ve driven the young woman, who was not only young but also blonde, from the East directly to the checkpoint—even if he’d known that the Swedish passport the young woman pulled out was a fake.

  And let’s assume—it’s only an assumption, Taddel—that Mariechen had snapped a picture of them both from a distance, the real Italian and the fake Swede, right after they’d been handed back their passports and arrived in the West after crossing the People’s Police checkpoint, and now, when they were closer, had stopped and got out of the sports car, whereupon the young woman took off her sunglasses and removed her kerchief, revealing her long, curly, flaxen hair, which in the passport photo had looked almost black, straight, and much shorter: if all that had taken place, when Mariechen brought the prints to father from the darkroom later, she could have said, Take a good look at this one. She’s something special. She’d be just right for you, if worse comes to worst, I mean, if all else fails.

  And further assuming—yes, Taddel, just for fun—if father, left alone in that big apartment, because mother whisked us all away to safety, looked at those eight six-by-nine photos and had a premonition about his second wife, like a vision, simply because after the Wall went up good old Marie had been at a certain place on a certain day, because he insisted on it, and had snapped picture after picture, maybe he wouldn’t have …

  Stop it, you two!

  You’re both crazy.

  What’s the point of all these ifs and maybes?

  Oh, all right, Taddel.

  Just speculation.

  A little joke.

  But the part about the Italian dentist and the escape—that part’s true.

  Even the two-seater part is true.

  We heard it from Jasper and Paulchen, it was their mother who told them how she made it from the East shortly after the Wall went up, with a false passport, a Swedish newspaper, some Swedish pocket change, and an Italian abetting her escape. Later, that same Emilio got her two sisters out …

  At any rate, our mother brought the three of us back from Switzerland and unpacked the suitcases.

  Obviously, Lara, father couldn’t have shown those photos of his second wife to anyone, if they’d really come out of the box.

  In any case, Mariechen knew him much better than he knew himself.

  Maybe so; she snapped those pictures of his cigarette butts when he was at a loss as to how we were going to keep going as a family …

  But because he puffed those hand-rolled cigarettes from morning till all hours, later, when it all went wrong, I’m sure Mariechen showed him, with the help of her box, how he could worm his way out of the schemozzle. I could use a hot tip like that myself now and then.

  But I remember that after mother brought us back from Switzerland, father kept going off to Schöneberg city hall because there was an election under way and he wanted to help out the mayor of Berlin, who was running against old Adenauer.

  You’d see posters for the two candidates all over town.

  The old chancellor looked like an Indian chief.

  But when we went for walks, father would point out only the mayor’s posters and say, That’s the one I’m backing. Remember that name.

  The posters said Willy. Adenauer harped on the fact he was born out of wedlock and had also been an emigrant. That was why father kept going to the city hall and editing speeches for Brandt, to make him a stronger candidate.

  Not till it was all over and old Adenauer had won did father get back to working on his Dog Years up there under the eaves.

  During that time you could see from photos, taken not by old Marie but by her Hans shortly before his death, with the Hasselblad or the Leica, I assume, that he was getting fatter. He put on weight because he’d contracted some lung problem in Paris.

  It was TB.

  He had to take pills …

  … and drink cream every day, which bulked him up.

  Still, the dog book did get finished. It dealt exclusively with the past, which he visualized down to the smallest details …

  … because Mariechen helped him with her box.

  And then, because we were bursting out of the apartment on Karlsbader Strasse, he was in a position to buy us the old clinker-brick house in Friedenau.

  He got it very cheap because after the Wall was built real estate prices went through the floor. It was a steal, he said later.

  But I remember that before we moved into that house, which workmen were fixing up from top to bottom, old Marie took pictures inside and out, because again father wanted to know who’d lived there before the war and during the war, and who’d done what under the eaves where he set up his new studio and painted fat nuns and scarecrows by the large window.

  We’ll tell you some other time about the adventures of the old clinker house.

  But in the snapshots that old Marie made with her Agfa box of the half-ruin on Karlsbader Strasse, Pat and I saw something our little brother won’t want to believe: the sons of a doctor, who may have been the medical director of the Charité Hospital, played there with an electric train set.

  But at that time there was no cabinetmaker’s shop to the left of the cellar, where I later got wood shavings.

  And on the right side there was no laundry yet, with a mangle and an old witch whom I tormented with dead pigeons I deposited at her door till she threatened to put Pat and me through the mangle, slowly, like Max and Moritz.

  I remember it all clearly, big brother, even though we were so little.

  Stop jabbering, you two.

  Okay, okay.

  And next time—promise—it’s Lara’s turn.

  And then it’ll be you, Taddel.

  Strange, the father comments to himself, that Pat and Jorsch can dig the mechanical scarecrows and the lists of dog names out of the rubbish heap of their memory but say not a word about the snowmen Marie had photographed for me, after it snowed through the night and the next day, whereupon I did not prevent Tulla, the child of my whimsy, from rolling the first snowman behind the half-ruin between the towering pines—as was later captured in writing—and, to be precise, on the forest side of the Erbsberg. Suddenly a thaw set in, which is why Jenny, once so plump, no longer had to endure as a swaddled insert but was allowed to step out of the thawing mush, resurrected as a delicate dancer, while the second snowman, which nine masked men, following orders, had rolled on the other side of the Erbsberg, and which Mariechen had also photographed at my request, thanks to the thaw revealed Eddy Amsel, transformed from fat to astonishingly skinny. Both characters survived the dog years in altered form.

  Ah, well, how could the children know the way this and that ended up on the printed page, if even their father merely pokes around in the gaps and can only guess where the images came from. In those days, all he had to do was whistle and the words came rushing … an inexhaustible wellspring … the background swarming with activity and the foreground filled with larger-than-life characters.

  Mariechen snapped more than could be dealt with or put in the mouths of the children.

  Miracle-wise

  THIS TIME IT is only four of the eight children who gather one weekend to bound back to the days of their youth. This time they are meeting at Jorsch’s. With his constantly busy wife and their three daughters he now oc
cupies that same clinker house where every year on their birthdays their father used a pencil to mark his, Pat’s, their sister Lara’s, and little Taddel’s height with the date on the wooden frame of the kitchen door; over the years, all the children succeeded in outgrowing their parents. And as they grew, so did the trees that Pat and Jorsch, barely old enough to go to school, had planted behind the house.

  The sons and daughters with other mothers also received invitations to the gathering, but Jorsch had queried whether their presence was absolutely essential, with the result that Lena, who was impatient for her turn, and Nana, who, as she said, theoretically would have liked to sit and listen, both declined, with varying degrees of regret. Jasper and Paulchen felt it was perfectly proper that they were still on the waiting list; Jasper had long-standing engagements that would have made it impossible for him to come.

  The summer holidays have just begun, and Jorsch’s daughters and their mother are on a trip. A postcard has arrived bearing greetings from a palm-dotted island in southern climes. The siblings sit in the kitchen with its view of the shaded rear garden and the firewall at the back, ivy scrambling up its flaking bricks. Pat is late because he had to visit some old friends. Taddel wants to know all about the new tenant who has moved into father’s old studio upstairs. Jorsch, who has recently become the sole owner of the clinker house, with the assent of the rest of the family, explains to his siblings how often and precisely where the old crate desperately needs expensive repairs. Lara listens to her brothers. Then she opens the oven to take out the pizza they had ordered earlier and warmed up. Bottles of cold cider come out of the fridge. At first no one seems to be in the mood to take up the father’s tales. All that counts for our father is what can be recounted, Taddel moans.

  Finally Jorsch brings up the box again, expressing his doubts as to whether, in the days when miracles still happened, the model in question was the No. 54 box camera, known as Box I: It was probably the successor to that one, the Agfa Special No. 64, with a more powerful lens and diamond viewfinders, with which old Marie …

  It doesn’t matter what she snapped with, Pat says. One way or the other, we believed in it.

  Before Taddel has a chance to contradict him, the father, as if with a ghostly hand, positions the microphone in front of Lara.

  We were all baptized. You boys and me when we still lived on Karlsbader Strasse. Taddel when we’d already moved to Friedenau. When my turn came, you, Pat, supposedly caused a ruckus. You got bored standing around in the church, because it went on and on. That’s what I heard, anyway. Our father wanted the baptism thing; even though he was a non-believer, he went on paying his church tax for years. And our mama, who was brought up on Zwingli’s doctrine, as was customary in Switzerland, had turned her back on anything connected with church. Nonetheless she was of the opinion, If it must be, then with all the hocus-pocus, by which I mean Catholic. And when the time came for Taddel to be baptized, our father is supposed to have said, The children will have to decide for themselves what they want to do once they think they’re adults; you can resign from any club.

  I gather he also said, It can’t hurt for them to learn at a young age how everything began with the story of the apple and the snake.

  By that he must have meant original sin.

  But in addition to the story of Adam and Eve, he told us about Cain and Abel.

  And who was allowed onto Noah’s ark, and who wasn’t.

  And everything that came later, all the miracles — the way Jesus could walk on water in his sandals, how he multiplied the loaves and fishes, and how he told a cripple, Take up thy bed and walk.

  He must have brought up the story of Esau’s birthright and the mess of pottage hundreds of times, because we twins were always in each other’s hair, and he certainly mentioned it whenever he cooked lentil soup, his favourite dish.

  Well, it didn’t do us any harm to be baptized, did it?

  But did it do us any good?

  Everything was different with our half-sisters, though. Lena and Nana were never baptized, and grew up heathens. That’s why, when Lena was twelve or thirteen, she took it into her head that she wanted to be baptized, and as a Catholic, too, because that was more meaningful; I assume she felt something was missing from her life. The plan was to have it done before a big audience, at the same time as her First Communion. What a fuss was made over her dress. First it was supposed to be as simple as a nightgown, then she wanted something with ruffles so she’d look like a little bride at her first public appearance.

  At any rate, the two of us were there, with Taddel and father, for the whole performance. With full audience participation, too: standing up, sitting down, singing, standing up again …

  Mieke and Rieke, Lena’s other half-sisters, told me you boys sat there obediently with father in a pew and sang loudly.

  No way, only father sang, far too loudly and totally off-key.

  We were so embarrassed.

  A good thing old Marie wasn’t there. With her Agfa’s special lens she’d certainly have caught the devil himself and then locked him up in her darkroom, so he …

  Right, father would have said. Snap away, Mariechen, let’s see Mr Satan, disguised as an acolyte, whispering a dirty joke into our Lena’s left ear when she hasn’t been baptized yet but has already assumed a pious expression.

  And Lena, who enjoyed off-colour jokes …

  Too bad I couldn’t be there — I don’t remember why. Later, much later, long after I’d had children of my own, and Lena was still in acting school and Nana was fifteen and seemed to be unhappily in love — but unwilling to talk to anyone about it — we three girls went to Italy with our father and visited churches in Umbria, as well as museums, of course. And it was obvious to me that Lena was still a believer. At least it looked that way when she crossed herself with holy water, in Assisi or Orvieto or wherever we went. I almost did so myself, but not quite. And I know that when Nana was in Dresden, training to be a midwife and hung up on that egomaniac, she went to Meissen with you, Pat, when you visited her. To see the sights, I suppose. And in the cathedral there, both of you lit candles before an altar … That was true, wasn’t it?

  We did it because father, when he was a soldier at seventeen and was wounded just before the war ended, was given new dressings in the Meissen castle, which had been turned into a sort of field hospital. I’m sure that was the only reason we …

  If I’d been there, maybe I’d have done the same thing for father, even though I’m like Jasper and Paulchen and believe in absolutely nothing. Those two grew up just like me, completely normal.

  But they must have picked up some religion, because for years their mother played the organ in a Protestant church, purely as a professional, Sunday after Sunday, and knew by heart not only Bach’s organ works but also the entire hymnal, though she wasn’t pious in the slightest.

  And our Mariechen? What did she believe in?

  The box, obviously.

  That was miracle enough for her.

  It was sacred to her.

  Right. At one point she told me, My box is like the good Lord: it sees all that was, that is, and that will be. You can’t pull the wool over its eyes. It sees through everything.

  And she never doubted that her Hans was in heaven.

  But Mariechen, unlike us in the beginning, wasn’t Catholic.

  Still, she had plenty going on magic-wise, though without wafers, wine, incense, and such.

  Father said one time, Our Mariechen comes from Masuria and holds with the old Borussian gods—Perkun and Potrimp and Pikoll and their ilk.

  Sometimes she mumbled stuff you couldn’t understand, as when she inserted a new roll of film. The phrase six-by-nine was always part of it—the picture format—but it sounded like a magic formula.

  That’s what I meant. My god, that was all so long ago. I still remember my Communion dress, because old Marie snapped pictures of me from all sides with her magic box.

  And some of them she mus
t have taken right before the ceremony, because I’m still wearing a wreath, but my dress is already splattered with chocolate sauce, even though I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it till after the ceremony, when all the guests were seated at tables, chattering away; there was that rule about taking Communion on an empty stomach and so forth. But as a child I had a terrible sweet tooth, for pudding, cream torte, whatever. Take a look, little Lara, Marie said, my box always knows in advance what you’re going to splatter all over yourself. I’ve no idea what became of those pictures. Only the photos she took with her Leica, perfectly normal photos, are in my album. But all the snapshots she took with her magic box are gone, like the ones of you, Taddel dear, when you were christened. That was in the Friedenau church …

  There were two nice chaplains we always enjoyed seeing, because both of them …

  Later they were reassigned, for disciplinary reasons.

  Allegedly they leaned too far to the left.

  At any rate, one photo showed lots of people standing around Taddel right after the baptism. And your godmother, a woman with lots of tight curls, was holding you as if you were her own. Our little Taddel was making a face you see him make to this day: a hurt-feelings face. Otherwise it looked like an ordinary christening picture, except that above you and your godmother some sort of spirit was hovering: A guardian angel, old Marie whispered when she showed the picture to me, and only to me. Well, it looked a bit like the guardian angel you see in the TV ads for some insurance company. My little Emma always laughs when she sees it flit across the screen just in time to prevent something awful from happening. Except that the spirit hovering over Taddel was dressed like a football player, wearing proper football boots, which looked ridiculous with the outstretched wings. And Taddel—don’t make that hurt-feelings face now!—who was crazy about football from the time he was very young, played with a club in Friedenau. Then, when he lived in the village with Jasper and Paulchen, he played for the local team. And much later, when you’d earned a degree in education to make up for the awful time you had in school, poor thing, you continued to play here and there. Now you and your daughter, who’s just as football-crazy as you were, are St Pauli fans, always believing in miracles. Despite all that kicking, you’ve never had a serious injury, so far as I know; that guardian angel from the magic box must have been watching over you.